Tuesday May 6th (JavaOne opening Day)

Travel: Mark McBride and gang picked me up and rode AmTrak to the Bay, then checked into the Hotel Monaco.

TS-5206 – Fortress: A Next-Generation Programming Language Brought to You by Sun Labs

I was not registered for a session at this time, but was able to get in last minute. Fortress, which looked to be a continuation or knock off of Fortran, has some neat features, but mainly would only be useful for complex mathematical equations or linear algebra. One of the features was that you could use actual functional equations as Fortress code. Most of the audience was researchers and scientific professionals.

TS-6623 – More “Effective Java”

Joshua Bloch presented a fast run-down of how to use some effective patterns when using Generics and Enum Types. After the session, we all purchased Mr. Bloch’s new edition of Effective Java and had him sign it.

General Seesion – Sun General Session Java-Centricity: Leveraging Java Technology at the hub of your Digital Life

We got into this session halfway through and sat in the back row. Neil Young (68 years old) showed up and was pushing his new Blu-ray disc and discussed some of the high-level Java technologies to make some of the features possible. The main presenter was pushing GlassFish as their new and improved product. I was expecting something new and innovated, but I guess since Java is such a mature language, no new innovations.

Presented by Roberto Chinnici, Senior Staff Engineer of Sun Microsystems, the presentation was a releasing and humorous discussion about how JavaScript is a functional programming language, has Object-oriented JavaScript technologies, and it’s a language that everyone loves to hate, meaning it’s misunderstood. Chinnici discussed how JS is a functional language, meaning that you can create functions within functions, assign variables as functions, and pass functions as parameters. He discussed some of the items why people love to hate JS, one being that there is no warning when there are multiple definitions of variables. Chinnici discussed creating objects and prototypes with JS, and the lack of original JS libraries. He did point out that in the future, JS will continue to but 3rd party libraries, such as Prototype, jMaki, Dojo, jQuery, Ext JS, Google Caja and so one. An interesting point was that he did not meaning anything about the YUI and emphasized that Java engineers only want to deal with JS when it is always integrated into the Java library, just as Dojo and Struts. Since we are starting to look at Web 2.0 technologies (buzz word), we should probably start looking at a way to have a JS library integrated into our Java libraries.

Code-Gear Party – ThirstyBear

We previously visited the Code-Gear booth early and tried to get them to sell us on JBuilder, and they invited us to their party. We accepted their free t-shirt and showed up at the party. The IPAs were flowing that night and I was a thirsty bear… I chatted with one of their sales reps, Andre, but I was still not sold on JBuilder.